Georges Perec in Life A User’s Manual1, [1] describes the life of the inhabitants of a single building, organizing this meticulously depicted world as an exhaustive catalogue of destinies. Following a certain French modernist tradition, particularly Raymond Roussel’s prose, Life, a User’s Manual contains pages of endlessly detailed description of things: furniture, wallpapers, obscure hobbies or innocuous routines that fill this world-building. The work is a pastiche on prevailing sociological categorization of life in the modern welfare state. More significant is however the conclusive gesture of the novel, its elaborated index at the end of the book. The indexation of the novel’s labyrinthine narrative comprises All Things, humans and objects treated indifferently. All arranged according to the logic of what could be called an ordinary world, a world mapped in its details, a collection of entries and a web of crossover relations, proper names properly indexed and topographically situated. In Things, Perec’s earlier novel, the author had already depicted a world wherein sociological and statistical data equates the relation between human beings to the relation between things.2 [2]

Perec’s premonitory depiction of modern life is marked by a tragedy to which one could contrast Mallarmé’s utopian project, the Book. His unachieved project was a book, with no binding, with exchangeable versos and rectos, it was supposed to be re-invented at each reading séance. Reading becomes then the corollary to the hazardous game of dice akin to Mallarmé: the cast of dice that is to be abolished by yet another cast. The cast doesn’t know of the rules of the game, nor does it coincide with the dice on the table, it is the vanishing moment of uncertainty generated by a decision, in itself a lapse of time. The question is how to conceive the world from the perspective of such a point of singularity without reducing it yet another Thing? Such a question recast the perspective on behalf of relations of men over and against the relation of things. Rather than reducing the advent of singularity to the investigation of its causal determinations in the world, i.e. as something that already has taken place, one starts from the standpoint of taking place of singularity, an immeasurable event that is too great to be allocated a place, too little to make a whole. Thinking from such a perspective is at the heart of the intellectual project associated with thinkers as diverse as Badiou, Deleuze and Lacan. In spite of their fundamental differences, their theories fall within what I would call the politics of materialist thinking against the thing-world: Thinking as action against the fetishistic social relations in contemporary capitalism.

Machinic VisionIt is against such a background one could grasp the ideological function of the computerized imagery of our time and the text production that surrounds it. Certainly, a significant shift in the global system of distribution and production of signs has taken place. In the literature on new digital media, a basic assumption is discernable: the machinic or computerized process of the generation of visual data gives rise to unstable and pulsating forms of consciousness in the post-human webs of machines and cognitive mapping activities.3 [3] Friedrich Kittler, a major author in the literature explicates: “Modulation, transformation, synchronization; delay, storage, transposition; scrambling, scanning, mapping — a total media link on a digital base will erase the very concept of medium. Instead of wiring people and technologies, absolute knowledge will run as an endless loop.”4 [4]

A recurring central thesis is that a new, virtual space has replaced the ponctiform subjectivity in central perspective. The space generated by disembodied machinic apparatus, it is argued, could now liberate perception from its bodily constraints. This thesis contains two coexisting frameworks. The analogical character of the visual sign subverted by the possibilities of the digitalization refers basically to a semiotic framework and its underpinning ontological claim about the image. A semiotic framework does not need to include any ocular point of reference. On the other hand, the deterritorialization of the perceiving point of view in computerized imagery relies on a phenomenological conception of the relation between the gaze and human body. This conflation relies upon a more important assumption, namely identification of image and vision. The imagination and visualization operate as interchangeable terms in new media theory. But imagination is not and could not be limited to vision neither to seeing as such. Image designates a wider field than what the series of vision–perception–gaze possibly could encompass. Images are also generated in non-visual situations: reading a book evokes images, images are called forth in the hallucinatory states.5 [5]

The exceeding character of imagination against and outside the visual field is a crucial point. For reasons closely related to the representation of things in the capitalist view of the world, epistemic models of the last century have departed from an unquestioned predominance of the visual over and against the imagination. The Structuralist tradition subordinated the image, conceived basically as the composition of pictorial elements, to the register of signifying differences. By doing this, the imaginary element of the picture was oversimplified and the imagination was treated in a way similar to the principles of the iconoclast theology of the classic age. In this respect, for instance, some of Lacan’s early seminars argued for the supremacy of the symbolic order, i.e. the signifying systems, over the imaginary.

It is precisely this identification of image and the visual that determines the category of subject in the discourse of machinic vision. The subject exists as an act of visualization and the image is a thing.

Deterritorialized Gaze

In an article on video art, the author Mark B. Hansen takes up a scene from Blade Runner:

“Rick Deckard scans a photograph into a 3-D rendering machine and directs the machine to explore the space condensed in the two-dimensional photograph as if it were three-dimensional. Following Deckard’s commands to zoom in and to pan right and left within the image space, the machine unpacks the ‘real’ three-dimensional world represented by the two-dimensional photograph. After catching a glimpse of his target — a fugitive replicant — reflected from a mirror within the space, Deckard instructs the machine to move around behind the object obstructing the two-dimensional photographic view of the replicant and to frame what it sees. Responding to the print command issued by Deckard, the machine dispenses a photograph of the replicant which is, quite literally, a close-up of an invisible—indeed nonexistent—part of the two dimensional original. And yet, following the fantasy of this scene, this impossible photograph is — or would be — simply the image of one particular data point within the data set comprising this three dimensional data space.”6 [6]

Hansen suggests then that the scene brings forward the rendering of two-dimensional information into three-dimensional space and this rendering is somehow independent from any given point of view usually associated with visual perception. The spatial property of digital visual production is then further discussed in regard to the referentiality of the visual sign, the article concludes:

“With this deterritorialization of reference, we reach the very scenario presented in the scene from Blade Runner — the moment when a computer can ‘see’ in a way profoundly liberated from the optical, perspectival, and temporal conditions of human vision. With the material fruition of the form of computer vision imagined in this scene, in other words, we witness a marked deprivileging of the particular perspectival image in favor of a total and fully manipulable grasp of the entire data space, the whole repertoire of possible images it could be said to contain.”7 [7]

Now, the theoretical approach that I just gave an example of is informed by two invariables: the spatial determination of the image as a mapped relation between things and the visual perception as a determination of subject. Concerning the latter, visual perception, the subject is conceived as a positionality, albeit this positionality is considered to be differently organized in the digital image compared to the perspectival position of quattrocento painting and rules of optics. Both the terms subject qua positionality and space as a mapped field of cognizable relations are the constants beneath the surface of explicit Deleuzian terminology. These invariables of the theories of machinic vision needs to be scrutinized further. The scene from Blade Runner discussed by Hansen depicts a temporal short circuit that follows from a communicational model in which the visual is directly plugged into the Other as if it is an automaton that never misses any possible differentiation in the reiteration of strings of data in a field whose coordinates are entirely determined along the line drawn from the will of sender and the desire of the receiver. The model is based upon two hypotheses. Firstly, the universe of signs is finite, everything is already there, if it is not perceivable, then it is because it is concealed, say behind some noise in the transfer of codes and it will be given in the future turn of the gaze as a machine. Secondly, what this eternal circuit extracts and represents corresponds to what the subject, the protagonist of the film, wants to see. Time here is entirely a deducible construction from the present; the future is the next turn of the reiteration and the past is what the present needs to know in order to make the next turn. The issue is not the real of references as Hansen in our example emphasizes, nor the truth, but rather the protocols for verification of authenticity of data according to the rules of the system itself. Nothing actually takes place other than the present. The point is to take the machinic vision seriously. Blade Runner is not only a representational structure, a symptom of the so-called information society. It is an ideological apparatus, a machine as an assemblage of technical devices; it is an Image-Thing that actively presupposes a totality of an indexed universe that comprises both the viewer and the filmic projection as such. The positions conferred to both the protagonist of the film and the viewer coincide: the liberal integrity of the exegete of an already given signifier whose meaning by definition is eternally deferred within the circuit of a pre-established technical order generated by the machine.

Consequently, the scene of the reproduction of the invisible from the movie is not, as Hansen claims, about the deterritorialization of reference (unless we understand the term reference in a naïve way) but illustrates what I would call techniques of the Other. Its function is to represent the invisible as a thing determinable within an a-temporal circuit.

Alain Badiou’s theory of decision and event or Lacan’s object should be read against the backdrop of these ‘Techniques of the Other’. In both Lacan and Badiou, a lack of self-identity marks any given situation. This lack or gap that separates One from itself, remains alien to the optical structure of the visual field per se, even though the visual field is based on it. In other words, the advent of being at any given point in the space remains always outside the reach of any well-ordered visual mapping of a situation. The Lacanian stain, for instance, is not about the inner limits of the visual field but exposes the desire-to-see to the limits of the non-representable in the heart of the Other. The subject of the encounter with this object that strictly lack existence doesn’t corresponds to the Other as the One, but to its function as a place holder for the lack of consistency in existence.

The OneDigitalized vision is the automated scaling, displacing and anonymizing fragments of input data according to a limited set of rules of construction. In other words, this is basically the process of scientific ciphering of things done by things.

But If it is true that the ponctiform subject of the visual field has been supplanted by the anonymity of web-based and digital techniques, an anonymity that is the landmark of the society of spectacle and in itself nothing other than the indifference of things-images, then the idea of a gaze without body, designates, not a liberation of vision, but precisely the opposite: the embodiment of a gaze detached from imagination entails the evermore overwhelming presence of a phantasmagorical Other. I think that this is the most central consequence of recent shifts of production of Techniques of the Other. This Other is the restitution of an omnipresent One in the circulation of signs.

Moreover, the phantasmagorical gaze upholds a regime of enjoyment based on a well-ordered world of regulated and catalogued differences. To employ a more precise Lacanian terminology, this is about a fundamentally catastrophic phallic jouissance of the One. 8 [8] Even though the dominant doxa of our time is all about critique of phalo-centrism or patriarchal order, etcetera, the phallic jouissance, specifically the fantasy of the anonymous Other’s ocular enjoyment, follows from the increasing weight of things in a world mapped by machines. The ever more accentuated vulnerability of the body in a variety of media discourses, proliferation of victim discourses or rationale of disempowerment discourses in contemporary art, are consequences of the fantasy of being constantly exposed to the insatiable jouissance of the One. The simple reverse of this symptomatic fantasy, the pursuit of the real in a return to the pure presence of body, which is detectable in religious or politically correct discourses, is a function of the presupposed impossibility of imagination outside the regime of the One. Georges Perec’s works, written during the 1960s and 70s, were an artistic presentation of this regime. They are unsurprisingly instances of an imagination that brackets the identification of the image and the visual field.

The UnnamableThe real has been introduced here as a non-representable limit. This does not mean that the real is the void as the positive foundation of presentation of being. The lapse of time, the cast of dice as Mallarmé referred to it, as far as it is related to the real, neither occupy any given place nor possess any substantial consistency, not even as a void, otherwise and if treated as a substantial place, one would end up in the cult of the real or the void. The eventfulness of the event is based upon an always anticipated intervention which does not abolish the undecidable.9 [9] An artwork for instance or a revolutionary decision, both generate irreversible material traces in different registers. Had it been otherwise, had the intervening decision restlessly canceled out undecidability as such, then we would have been left with a pure act of unconditioned will that fills up the void that once was its source. This is a regress to a theological universe steered by the One.

In a discussion on Beckett, Alain Badiou develops the idea of the unnamable, which in a way is a further development of the relation between the subjective moment and the undecidable.10 [10] The unnamable is for him the term to which “no naming could adjust, how great the sources of becoming the trace of the truth it ever possess.”11 [11] After the destitution of the One, it remains nevertheless a minimal terminal unique point, a unicity as Badiou calls it. This unicity is that which separates and unites thinking and things. It marks the radical indifference of things in their relation to thinking. This is the underneath that which I called the source of jouissance as located in the Techniques of the Other. Before such a unicty the subject — in so far as it recognizes the imposition of an ethical choice — is inevitably and always introduced as an anticipated subjective moment. Two ways are open: interminable indexation of the references of the invisible in a play of concealment (Verborgenheit) or faithfulness to the timely anticipation of an imaginable recast of dice against the regime of everyday life. A popular uprising or an artistic practice that still invokes an all-seeing Other remains within the visual field of the capitalist fetishism. It is by stepping outside such a field that an uprising is transformed into a revolutionary idea or the artistic practice into an artwork. All indicates that such an eventfulness is a rare case.

[1] La vie, mode d’emploi:romans, Hachette, 1977.

[2] Cf Karl Marx, Capital, Vol.1.

[3] See among others John Johnston, “Machinic Vision”, Critical Inquiry, 1, Autumn 1999. For analogical sign and referentiality, see William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1992. Freidrich Kittler’s writings, particularly Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Stanford University Press, 1999, provides an example of the characteristic scheme of the supposedly destitute Cartesian ego in computerized imagery.

[4] In Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, ibid.

[5] Michel de Certeau in Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, 1984. The scene of reading in the Parisian underground, is a moment of imagination that escapes the public control of a visually given and recognizable situation.

[6] Mark B. Hansen, Diacritic, Winter 2001, p. 54

[7] Ibid, p. 57.

[8] This is deducible from two major Lacanian propositions, “There is no sexual relationship.” and “There is one.” (il y a de l’un). For both propositions, see Encore, Le séminaire XX, Seuil, 1977, p.116.

[9] See further my essay, “Index et anticipation”, in Autour de la pensée d’Allain Badiou, L’harmattan, 2007.

[10] See in Alain Badiou, Conditions, Seuil, 1992.

[11] Conditions, p. 209.

1. La vie, mode d’emploi:romans, Hachette, 1977.↩
2. Cf Karl Marx, Capital, Vol.1.↩
3. See among others “Machinic Vision” by John johnston in Critical Inquiry, 1, Automn 1999. For analogical sign and referentiality, see William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1992. Freidrich Kittler’s writings, particularly Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Stanford University Press, 1999, provides an example of the characteristic scheme of the supposedly destituted Cartesian ego in computerized imagery.↩
4. In Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, ibid.↩
5. See Michel de Certeau in Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, 1984. The scene of reading in the Parisian underground, is a moment of imagination that escapes the public control of a visually given and recognizable situation.↩
6. Mark B. Hansen, Diacritic, Winter 2001, p. 54↩
7. Ibid, p. 57.↩
8. This is deducible from two major Lacanian propositions, “There is no sexual relationship.” and “There is one.” (il y a de l’un). For both propositions, see Encore, Le séminaire XX, Seuil, 1977, p.116.↩
9. See further my essay, “Index et anticipation”, in Autour de la pensée d’Allain Badiou, L’harmattan, 2007.↩
10. See in Alain Badiou, Conditions, Seuil, 1992.↩
11. Conditions, p. 209.↩